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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24447703">all smiles and city manners</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/whytho/pseuds/whytho'>whytho</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dimension 20 (Web Series), The Unsleeping City</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon, brennan placed her so gently in my hands and said 'she's for you', look you can't expect me not to love esther</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 10:08:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,162</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24447703</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/whytho/pseuds/whytho</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"At seventeen, Esther is spending every afternoon from four to seven at Clinton Hill Chantry; on the weekends, she wakes up early, visits the farmers’ market to pick up some fresh fruit, and bikes to the Gramercy Occult Society."</p><p>Esther Sinclair has been cursed for her entire life; she does magic regardless.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>35</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>all smiles and city manners</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>edit: i am now realizing that esther is in fact a wizard 🙃 and not... anything other than a wizard 🙃 in my defense im too pretty to know shit about dnd. anyway this still makes sense but i wanted to explain</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>At seventeen, Esther is spending every afternoon from four to seven at Clinton Hill Chantry; on the weekends, she wakes up early, visits the farmers’ market to pick up some fresh fruit, and bikes to the Gramercy Occult Society. Most weekends she pulls an all-nighter, squinting at tiny fonts in dusty books or practicing spells that she knows she could do in her sleep. She gets back home from the library as the sun sets, eats dinner with her father, and wakes up to get ready for Monday morning homeroom. </p><p>Maya Lewis, who sits next to Esther in AP Psych, disappears a month into the school year. They’re not really friends, but sometimes Esther will borrow her notes. Rumors swirl – her family moved to California; she ran off to marry some Wall Street guy; she’s pregnant – but when she comes back in January the only thing that’s different about her is the red, swollen look to her eyes. That, and she dropped down into standard classes. </p><p>Esther tries to imagine dropping classes and cringes. (It’s not that she cares about any of the classes, but she wants the college credit.) She tries not to think about the change in the angle of Maya’s shoulders. It doesn’t do well to dwell on the tragedies of high school girls. </p><p>Instead, she runs her fingers down the leather spines of the countless books on the Chantry’s bookshelves. She teaches Ana how to wrap flames around her fingers and coaches Amelia through reshaping the earth; she juices fresh fruit for Alejandro and eats the sticky leftover flesh. She goes to a concert on Coney Island with her father and leans against him in the crowd; as the bass guitar thrums he drapes an arm across her shoulders, and his side is solid against hers. </p><p>And she studies, and reads, and applies to almost every college in the city. Her desk at the Chantry is filled with stacks of books and papers and her laptop, perched on the very edge, and whenever she tries to clear it off the piles just seem to get shifted. She keeps it messy so that she knows where everything is, like how she knows the vague location of every book or artifact in the Chantry, and where every old magical stooge spends his time at the Occult Society. With the exception of a couple other magical legacies, almost everyone in the Unsleeping City is older than her, and most of them don’t pay her much attention. Esther’s fine with it: people come into their magical ability much later than she did, most of the time, and she can wait for the City to catch up with her. For now, she studies, and she gets accepted into almost every college in the city. </p><p>Alejandro wants her to study at Columbia – they can teach her almost anything she wants to know, he says, because he helped teach most of the current professors in her specialization there. </p><p>Esther doesn’t need to be taught magic. It takes more of an effort to keep her spells from just happening, springing out from her fingertips the way they want to, than it does to imagine the blueprint of the spell in her mind. Alejandro learns and practices and perfects what he does. Esther already knows how to do it all, instinctively; she studies so that she knows why the magic works the way that it does, and so that she can stop the magic from happening. </p><p>So she goes to NYU, and studies the books hidden away in a corner of Bobst Library where other students can’t find them. She hooks up with the guys that make eyes at her across classrooms and the girls that dance with her at clubs. She attends Ana and Amelia’s high school graduation; her father and Alejandro come to hers. She gets an apartment in Brooklyn while she gets her Master’s but doesn’t sleep there much; instead, she curls up in the big four poster bed at the Chantry and wakes up early to make herself pancakes. </p><p>It’s during one of those early mornings that she destroys the Chantry’s kitchen. </p><p>She stares, horrified, at the five foot tall pillar of fire in front of her; distantly, she can hear the fire alarm shrieking and the calm voice of the building’s safety cantrip. Trying to smother the flame with her magic didn’t work, nor did tossing a towel onto it, but Esther is the proctor of the Clinton Hill Chantry and she can’t exactly let it burn down because she’s bad at making breakfast. Instead, she holds the blueprint of another spell in her mind, concentrates, and is about to cast it when a hand lands on her shoulder. </p><p>“Ma’am,” the hand’s owner says behind her. “The building is on fire. I need to get you and everyone else out before I can put a stop to this.” </p><p>Normally, Esther would be impressed by the speed of the FDNY, but right now she’s more annoyed than anything else. “It’s my kitchen,” she tells the hand owner, not looking back at them, “and I’m staying. There’s a fire extinguisher upstairs.” </p><p>The hand retracts from her shoulder, but the owner does not leave. “You really can’t be in this kitchen when it’s burning down, ma’am.” </p><p>“It’s my kitchen!” </p><p>All Esther hears is one distant apology before she’s up off the ground, and moving quickly through the house. The arms wrapped around her are too solid for her to jostle her way out of them, and it’s only a couple of seconds before she’s outside with the other few wizards who were in the Chantry at 5:30 in the morning. Whoever picked her up is gone by the time she turns around, but no one else is near enough to stop her from darting back through the door and into the house. </p><p>Sure, the place is on fire, but Esther’s seen worse while play-fighting with the twins. That, and the fact that it’s her own goddamn kitchen, means that she’s perfectly willing to run past Frank shouting at her, climb up the steps two at a time, and grab the fire extinguisher from the upstairs closet. </p><p>When she gets to the upper landing, though, she’s stopped by the sight of a fireman bathed in the golden glow of his axe. That alone wouldn’t be enough to stop Esther normally, but there’s a glass case broken open across the hall. As leader of the Chantry, Esther knows almost exactly where each book and artifact is, and there should be a golden blade in that particular cabinet. </p><p>As she watches, the fireman frowns and holds the axe to the side of his face, illuminating his features in gold. “Really?” he says – not to Esther, but to the axe – and a knot in Esther’s stomach tightens as his brown eyes narrow in gentle puzzlement. </p><p>Ricky Matsui had found his questing blade. Esther Sinclair thinks,<i> Fuck, he’s hot.</i></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>title from... so I was looking for a title from a song, and it turns out someone set "The New Colossus" to music as well as two other texts, and titled the cycle "Three Women", and so of course I had to use a quote from the third one and that was "The Waltz" by Dorothy Parker. long story short it came from an act of fate. </p><p>but seriously, I have so many thoughts about esther sinclair. since she's the head of the chantry in her twenties i think it's an inherited position? tompkins is in manhattan but the chantry's in brooklyn so like... which is she from? her magic is most likely different than any wizards because it's second nature to her? im in love? she made me want to write for the first time in LITERAL YEARS?</p><p>anyway, i love esther and i love ricky and i love d20 and if anyone wants to cry about it with me... feel free.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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